TPB AFK (The Pirate Bay – Away From Keyboard) Review: In Which Pirates Go To Court

I’m really not sure what to make of this film. The producers want it to spread across the internet – I’ve even included it below – but I’m not sure of the motive. What is this film really trying to say? The Pirate Bay – Away From Keyboard is a play on a statement made by one of The Pirate Bay’s co-founders in which he states that they don’t meet “IRL”, but instead step away from the keyboard. The internet is their real life and The Bay’s office is little more than an IRC chatroom. TPB AFK tells the story of these scrappy, idealistic IT workers with seemingly conflicted motives managing the world’s largest tracking site for BitTorrent feeds, many of which are used to ferry copyrighted movies, music, anything. But, what’s the moral of the story? Is piracy inevitable or is there a genuinely altruistic reasoning behind it? The film doesn’t really explain either way.

It’s hard to believe it’s been over five years since Fredrik, Peter, and Gottfrid were brought on trial for their work on The Pirate Bay. The film follows them in their court case from original indictment through their final denied appeal by the Swedish Supreme Court. In the early years, the trio laughs at the prosecution and those who would dare oppose the spread of information, even taking to live video streams to communicate their distaste for the whole process. Their defense is an odd one and it’s not long before you see where the courts ruled against them. On one hand, they claim they’re a neutral party, a blank page designed purely to list these BitTorrent feeds. They’re not pirating anything any more than Google is when they manage to take on pirate links. On the other hand, they claim that copyright is a kind of shackle and Hollywood, et al should be ashamed for trying to prevent the spread of their content to the four corners of the internet.

And then they lose their case. The trio, plus a fourth party, are sentenced to a year in prison and $4.5 million in damages. Over the next few years, their confidence seems to waver as they lose their appeals and some of the defendants begin to take up postings in southeast Asia to dodge imprisonment.

The Bay’s minor victories come by the skin of their teeth, like when they uncover that the judge in the initial trial was tied to a copyright-protection group, but the courts find that there was no conflict of interest. Or, later on, they help WikiLinks when they come under fire by getting them shacked up under the Piracy Party’s web servers where they become “politically immune” under Sweden’s censorship laws. TPB AFK is a kind of self-deprecating story. They sound like misunderstood and sophisticated winners with grassroots pro-piracy groups by their side, but wind up sounding like desperate defendants trying to skirt the law for the sake of their own lives. If it’s here to glorify piracy, it never makes a good case for it. If it’s here to glorify The Pirate Bay or its founders then real world consequences have mitigated that.